The three biggest lies in the USA today: 1) The check is in the mail.
2) I gave at the office.
3) (Big, cheery smile) "h.e.l.lo! I"m from Washington. I"m here to help you!"
1~ -Anon.f
FOREWORD.
In April 1962 I received a letter from the advertising agents of Hoffman Electronics: They had a wonderful idea-SF stories about electronics, written by wellknown SF writers, just long enough to fill one column of Scientific American or Technology Review or such, with the other two thirds of the page an ad for Hoffman Electronics tied into the gimmick of the story. For this they offered a gee-whiz word rate-compared with SF magazines.
A well-wrought short story is twice as hard to write as a novel; a short-short is at least eight times as hard-but one that short. . . there are much easier ways of making a living. I dropped them a postcard saying, "Thanks but I"m busy on a novel." (True-GLORY ROAD) They upped the ante. This time I answered, "Thanks and I feel flattered-but I don"t know anything about electronics." (Almost true.) They wrote back offering expert advice from Hoffman"s engineers on the gimmick-and a word rate six times as high as The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post had paid me.
I had finished GLORY ROAD; I sat down and drafted this one-then sweated endlessly to get it under 1200 words as required by contract. Whereas I had written GLORY ROAD in 23 days and enjoyed every minute of it. This is why lazy writers prefer novels.
SEARCHLIGHT.
"Will she hear you?"
"If she"s on this face of the Moon. If she was able to get out of the ship. If her suit radio wasn"t damaged. If she has it turned on. If she is alive. Since the ship is silent and no radar beacon has been spotted, it is unlikely that she or the pilot lived through it."
"She"s got to be found! Stand by, s.p.a.ce Station. Tycho Base, acknowledge."
Reply lagged about three seconds, Washington to Moon and back. "Lunar Base, Commanding General."
"General, put every man on the Moon out searching for Betsy!"
Speed-of-light lag made the answer sound grudging. "Sir, do you know how big the Moon is?"
"No matter! Betsy Barnes is there somewhere-so every man is to search until she is found. If she"s dead, your precious pilot would be better off dead, too!"
"Sir, the Moon is almost fifteen million square miles. If I used every man I have, each would have over a thousand square miles to search. I gave Betsy my best pilot. I won"t listen to threats against him when he can"t answer back. Not from anyone, sir! I"m sick of being told what to do by people who don"t know Lunar conditions. My advice-my official advice, sir-is to let Meridian Station try. Maybe they can work a miracle.
The answer rapped back, "Very well, General! I"ll speak to you later. Meridian Station! Report your plans."
Elizabeth Barnes, "Blind Betsy," child genius of the piano, had been making a USO tour of the Moon.
She "wowed "em" at Tycho Base, then lifted by jeep rocket for Farside Hardbase, to entertain our lonely missilemen behind the Moon. She should have been there in an hour. Her pilot was a safety pilot; such ships shuttled unpiloted between Tycho and Farside daily.
After lift-off her ship departed from its programming, was lost by Tycho"s radars. It was. . .
somewhere.
Not in s.p.a.ce, else it would be radioing for help and its radar beacon would be seen by other ships, s.p.a.ce stations, surface bases. It had crashed-or made emergency landing-somewhere on the vastness of Luna.
"Meridian s.p.a.ce Station, Director speaking-" Lag was unnoticeable; radio bounce between Washington and the station only 22,300 miles up was only a quarter second. "We"ve patched Earthside stations to blanket the Moon with our call. Another broadcast blankets the far side from Station Newton at the threebody stable position. Ships from Tycho are orbiting the Moon"s rim-that band around the edge which is in radio shadow from us and from the Newton. If we h "
ear- "Yes, yes! How about radar search?"
"Sir, a rocket on the surface looks to radar like a million other features the same size. Our one chance is to get them to answer.. . if they can. Ultrahigh-resolution radar might spot them in months-but suits worn in those little rockets carry only six hours" air. We are praying they will hear and answer."
"When they answer, you"ll slap a radio direction finder on them. Eh?"
"No, sir."
"In G.o.d"s name, why not?"
"Sir, a direction finder is useless for this job. It would tell us only that the signal came from the Moon-which doesn"t help."
"Doctor, you"re saying that you might hear Betsy- and not know where she is?"
"We"re as blind as she is. We hope that she will be able to lead us to her. . . if she hears us."
"How?"
"With a laser. An intense, very tight beam of light. She"ll hear it-"
"Hear a beam of light?"
"Yes, sir. We are jury-rigging to scan like radar- that won"t show anything. But we are modulating it to give a carrier wave in radio frequency, then modulating that into audio frequency-and controlling that by a piano. If she hears us, we"ll tell her to listen while we scan the Moon and run the scale on the piano-"
"All this while a little girl is dying?"
"Mister President-shut up!"
"Who was THAT?"
"I"m Betsy"s father. They"ve patched me from Omaha. Please, Mr. President, keep quiet and let them work. I want my daughter back."
The President answered tightly, "Yes, Mr. Barnes. Go ahead, Director. Order anything you need."
In Station Meridian the Director wiped his face. "Getting anything?"
"No. Boss, can"t something be done about that Rio Station? It"s sitting right on the frequency!"
"We"ll drop a brick on them. Or a bomb. Joe, tell the President."
"I heard, Director. They"ll be silenced!"
"Sh! Quiet! Betsy-do you hear me?" The operator looked intent, made an adjustment.
From a speaker came a girl"s light, sweet voice: "-to hear somebody! Gee, I"m glad! Better come quick-the Major is hurt."
The Director jumped to the microphone. "Yes, Betsy, we"ll hurry. You"ve got to help us. Do you know where you are?"
"Somewhere on the Moon, I guess. We b.u.mped hard and I was going to kid him about it when the ship fell over. I got unstrapped and found Major Peters and he isn"t moving. Not dead-I don"t think so; his suit puffs out like mine and I hear something when I push my helmet against him. I just now managed to get the door open." She added, "This can"t be Farside; it"s supposed to be night there. I"m in sunshine, I"m sure. This suit is pretty hot."
"Betsy, you must stay outside. You"ve got to be where you can see us."
She chuckled. "That"s a good one. I see with my ears."
"Yes. You"ll see us, with your ears. Listen, Betsy. We"re going to scan the Moon with a beam of light. You"ll hear it as a piano note. We"ve got the Moon split into the eighty-eight piano notes. When you hear one, yell, "Now!" Then tell us what note you heard. Can you do that?"
"Of course," she said confidently, "if the piano is in tune."
"It is. All right, we"re starting-"
"Now!"
"What note, Betsy?"
"E flat the first octave above middle C."
"This note, Betsy?"
"That"s what I said."
The Director called out, "Where"s that on the grid? In Mare Nubium? Tell the General!" He said to the microphone, "We"re finding you, Betsy honey! Now we scan just that part you"re on. We change setup. Want to talk to your Daddy meanwhile?"
"Gosh! Could I?"
"Yes indeed!"
Twenty minutes later the Director cut in and heard: "-of course not, Daddy. Oh, a teensy bit scared when the ship fell. But people take care of me, always have."
"Betsy?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Be ready to tell us again."
"Now!" She added, "That"s a bullfrog G, three octaves down."
"This note?"
"That"s right."
"Get that on the grid and tell the General to get his ships up! That cuts it to a square ten miles on a side! Now, Betsy-we know almost where you are. We are going to focus still closer. Want to go inside and cool off?"
"I"m not too hot. Just sweaty."
Forty minutes later the General"s voice rang out: "They"ve spotted the ship! They see her waving!"
AFTERWORD.
In 1931 I was serving in LEXINGTON (CV-2). In March the Fleet held a war game off the coast of Peru and Ecuador; for this exercise I was a.s.signed as radio compa.s.s officer. My princ.i.p.al duty was to keep in touch with the plane guards, amphibians (OL8-A), guarding squadrons we had in the air-i.e., the squadrons were carrierbased land planes; if one was forced to ditch, an amphibian was to land on the water and rescue the pilot.
No radar in those days and primitive radio-the pilots of the plane guards were the only ones I could talk to via the radio compa.s.s. The fighters had dot-dash gear; the radio compa.s.s did not. To get a feeling for the limitations of those days, only 28 years after the Wright brothers" first flight, see my "The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail" in Time Enough For Love, PutnamlBerkleylNEL.
A radio compa.s.s depends on the directional qualities of a loop antenna. To talk you rotate the antenna for maximum signal; turn it 90 and you get a minimum signal that marks the direction of the other radio-or 180 from it but you are a.s.sumed to know whether your beacon is ahead or behind you-and you do in almost every case where it matters, such as going up a channel in a fog. That minimum will tell you direction within a degree or two if the other radio is close enough, loud enough.
If it"s too far away, the signal can fade to zero before you reach the bearing you need to read, and stay zero until well past it. No use turning it back 90 to try to locate it by the maximum signal; that curve is much too flat.
Late afternoon the second day of the exercise we were in trouble; the other squadrons were landing but VF-2 squadron was lost-all too easy with one-man fighter planes before the days of radar. The captain of the squadron, a lieutenant commander, held one opinion; the pilot of the amphib held another-but his opinion did not count; he was a j.g. and not part of the squadron. The juniors in the squadron hardly had opinions; they were young, green, and depending on their .~kipper-~znd probably had fouled up their dead reckoning early in the flight.
The squadron captain vectored for rendezvous with the carrier, by his reckoning. No carrier. Just lots and lots of ocean. (I was in the air once, off Hawaii, when this happened. It"s a lonely feeling.) No sign of the U.S. Fleet. No SARATOGA (CV-3), no battleships, no cruisers. Not even a destroyer scouting a flank. Just water.
At this point I found myself in exactly the situation described in SEARCHLIGHT; I could talk to the plane guard pilot quite easily-but swing the loop 90 and zero signal was spread through such a wide arc that it meant nothing. . . and, worse, the foulup in navigation was such that there was no rational choice between the two lobes 180 apart.
And I had a personal interest not as strong as that of Betsy Barnes" father but strong. First, it was my duty and my responsibility to give that squadron a homing vector-and I couldn"t do it; the equipment wasn"t up to it. Had I kept track of vectors on that squadron all day- But that was impossible; Not only had I had four squadrons in the air all day and only one loop but also (and d.a.m.ning) there was war-game radio silence until the squadron commander in trouble was forced to break it.